Breathing race into the machine : the surprising career of the spirometer from plantation to genetics / Lundy Braun.

Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2014]

xxix, 271 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm

"Portions of chapters 1 and 2 were previously published as "Spirometry, Measurement, and Race in the Nineteenth Century," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 60 (2005): 135-169."

Introduction: Measuring vital capacity -- "Inventing" the spirometer: working class bodies in Victorian England -- Black lungs and white lungs: the science of white supremacy in the nineteenth-century United States -- The professionalization of physical culture: making and measuring whiteness -- Progress and race: vitality in turn-of-the century Britain -- Globalizing spirometry: the "racial factor" in scientific medicine -- Adjudicating disability in the industrial worker -- Diagnosing silicosis: physiological testing in South African gold mines -- Epilogue: how race rakes root.

Includes bibliographical references and index.